Are U.S. officials working up
to an indictment of the ex- president for alleged links to drug runners?

By JOSEPH CONTRERAS

Ever since a nationwide
rebellion forced Haiti's President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to flee the impoverished island
country in February 2004, federal prosecutors in Miami have systematically tracked down
and imprisoned some of his top law-enforcement officials on money-laundering and
drug-trafficking allegations. To date, the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District
of Florida has obtained the convictions of four former police officials including
the former director of the Haitian National Police and the head of security at the
presidential palace under Aristide and a onetime senator belonging to the deposed
Haitian president's Lavalas party on charges that they shook down prominent Colombian and
Haitian traffickers for bribes. Earlier this month, prosecutors suffered a setback when a
jury acquitted Aristide's former counternarcotics czar on similar allegations. But the
U.S. Attorney's Office promptly issued a statement defending what it called "an
aggressive approach to these cases" and vowing to "continue to pursue
them." Which raises a pointed question: will federal prosecutors now seek an
indictment of Aristide (putting
former Haitian murderous dictator and druglord Aristide in tight handcuffs, whose job is
that?)himself?

Spokesmen for the U.S. Attorney's Office have consistently declined to comment on
recurring press reports that Aristide is a target of the federal grand jury that returned
the indictments against his underlings. That tons of U.S.-bound cocaine moved through
Haiti during Aristide's second term as president from 2001 to 2004 comes as no surprise:
prior to his fall from power, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had listed
Haiti among the top three drug-trafficking countries worldwide. But Aristide, exiled in
South Africa, has consistently denied any personal knowledge of or involvement in
narcotics trafficking or drug- related corruption. And no evidence has yet been presented
in court that directly implicates him in such activity.

Still, in the trial that ended on Oct. 7, his presidential-palace security chief, Oriel
Jean, appeared as a government witness and testified that Aristide personally approved
issuing a palace identification badge to a Haitian businessman named Serge Edouard who was
later convicted of drug trafficking. And according to a confidential DEA document, dated
May 3, 1994, obtained by NEWSWEEK, allegations that Aristide accepted payments from drug
traffickers date back to his first term as president in 1991.

In April 1994, DEA agents conducted a series of debriefings with a Colombian informant
in the offices of the Colombian attorney general in Bogota. The informant, midlevel
trafficker Juan Molina, who had abandoned the drug trade, told the DEA agents that
Aristide had received two six-figure payments from representatives of the Medellin-cartel
kingpin Pablo Escobar. The first payment of $600,000 was allegedly made in December 1990
when Aristide was a candidate for the presidency of Haiti. The money was given in exchange
for alleged assurances from Aristide that, should he win, the Medellin cartel could
continue to use Haiti as a transshipment point for cocaine headed for the United States
and other countries. A second payment of $250,000 was allegedly delivered by Molina
himself to Aristide in June 1991, four months after he took office as president and three
months before he was toppled in a military coup.

At the time of the DEA document, the Clinton administration was seeking a negotiated
agreement with the generals who overthrew Aristide that would have allowed the Haitian
president to return home from his exile in Washington. Nothing ever came of Molina's
sensational accusations. A DEA request to interview Aristide at his home in Georgetown was
turned down by the Justice Department since the informant's charges were uncorroborated.

A decade later, do the Feds have more to go on? At a sentencing hearing held in Miami
only days before Aristide relinquished power in the winter of 2004, the convicted Haitian
trafficker Jacques Ketant (his ultru-luxury mansion)
claimed to have paid the president and Jean as much as $500,000 a month for permission to
land cocaine-laden planes inside the country. During his testimony in Edouard's trial
earlier this year, Jean said that the defendant had donated money to Aristide's private
social-welfare foundation and stated that the palace security badge issued to Edouard
effectively gave the kingpin virtual immunity from arrest inside Haiti. But Jean, who
acknowledged receiving bribes from Edouard himself, also testified that Aristide was
unaware of Jean's collaboration with the trafficker and got wind of it only when the
president confronted Jean about the issue in 2003.

Eyebrows were raised in both Haiti and the United States when looters discovered
$350,000 in cash in the basement of Aristide's private residence in Port-au-Prince on the
day after the president fled the country. Aristide declined repeated requests from
NEWSWEEK for an interview, but his attorney Ira Kurzban attributed all drug-related
allegations implicating Aristide to what he called "a false, defamatory,
disinformation campaign" by the Bush administration against his client.
"President Aristide has never been involved in any illegal activity in Haiti,"
Kurzban said in a written statement. "The DEA's evidence against President Aristide
consists solely of rumors from known or convicted drug dealers."

As Haiti prepares later this year to hold its first presidential election since
Aristide's fall from power, the former president is a largely spent political force who
appears likely to remain in exile for the foreseeable future. It is less certain whether
he will ever wind up on the receiving end of a federal indictment.